Michael Redmond, a 9 dan professional from Japan, visited the UK between March
30 and April 9 2013. You can find out more about his visit on the BGA website
starting at http://www.britgo.org/teaching/redmond. The visit was made possible by
the sponorship of the Nihon Kiin and the Sasakawa Foundation.

This post is specifically about Redmond's visit to Leamington Go Club. The
evening was intended to be for the benefit of kyu players. There were about 20
people in the audience, mostly from the Leamington and Birmingham clubs. The
session had three parts. First, Redmond talked about middle-game fighting and
end-game counting, using some of his own games. The second part was a
question-and-answer session, in which Redmond spoke openly about his life as a
professional go player in Japan. In the third part, Redmond commented on three
games between kyu players. Two of these games had been submitted (but not
chosen) by your unworthy correspondent.

A few personal notes are appropriate. I am unfortunately not strong enough to
transmit much of the technical Go information in Redmond's talk. This report
is mostly about the event itself.

I was already a Go player in 1979 when Redmond moved to Japan at the age of 14.
I remember thinking at the time that he had taken a remarkably brave step.
Before the meeting at Leamington, I wondered whether Redmond would still be
fluent in English after so long in Japan: he certainly is. You can use YouTube
to hear him commenting in English during the 2012 World Mind Games event in
Beijing.



Leamington Part 1

Redmond described a series of ko fights starting at move 55 in the following
game against Kurotaki Masonori, 7p. He talked about when to make a ko bigger
and when to end it.


Redmond illustrated end-game counting using the following game against So Yokoku,
starting at move 133.


He used the method called Swing or Deiri counting http://senseis.xmp.net/?Deiri
and focussed on the mechanics of counting. He did not say much about sente, gote or tedomari.
In the game against So Yokoku, he mentioned that plays at the top left (point C on
move 133) and bottom left (point B) were both worth 8 points, which means they
are miai and it is not urgent to play either of them. An alert member of the
audience noticed that when his opponent (White) later played at B, Black did not
reply at C, so that eventually White got B and C. Redmond simply said that
it had been his mistake.

Redmond was challenged on how to count and evaluate every region of interest if
one has the problems of forgetting the numbers and/or the mental dividing lines
used to delimit each region. Either problem results in having to start again,
and possibly yet again. His answer was to keep practising, and to always use
the same method; either choosing borders which minimise the counts, or
anchoring them on visual features in the configuration of stones, such as
notches or projections. This was a polite answer to an important but almost
impossible question.

Redmond advised against trying to estimate the score early in a game: it
is futile.

Redmond requested that some pictures be taken with his camera, because he
needed them to show the Nihon Kiin that he had been doing his job. This picture
is better than the view that I had from the back of the audience.


As you can see, Redmond used a laptop linked to a projector. Once he
found the correct program for viewing the game records, he used it very
fluently and well.

Leamington Part 2

This was the question and answer part. The report is anything but accurate
or complete, but "I" means Redmond in this section.

Q. What made you leave your home and travel to a foreign country for the sake
of a silly board game?

A. I love the game. My father taught me when I was 10. When I was 13, we had
a family holiday in Japan and visited the Nihon Kiin which had accommodation
for foreign visitors at that time. I found a simultaneous game against a
professional in progress, and was allowed to join in. I was about amateur
shodan at that time, and got either 8 or 9 stones, not sure which. I felt sure
I would win, but actually lost by 1 point, which may may well have been done on
purpose. On returning to America, I told my parents that I wanted to move to
Japan and study to be a professional. They were not too happy about it, but
agreed to let me go to Japan for a year so that if the Go studies did not work
out at least I would have acquired a language and could return to school in the
US. I was about amateur 4 dan when I went back to Japan at the age of 14, and
it did work out.

(Note: Wikipedia says that Redmond learnt Go at the age of 11: your reporter may
be mistaken in remembering age 10.)

Q. Do you still compete in tournaments?

A. Yes. I generally reach the second or third stage of major tournaments these
days. I have just been on a Japanese cruise ship in the South Pacific (cries
of "It's a hard life!" from the audience), and I had to postpone some games,
but fortunately I did not have to default. I plan to catch up with my playing
schedule.

Q. Do you ever play Go against your wife? (She is also a professional.)

A. I am much stronger than my wife. We have played, but professionals are very
competitive. The game becomes serious, and that is not good for the marriage!

Q. Do you play on the Internet?

A. Sometimes.

Q. Which current professionals do you admire?

A. Gu Li from China and Li Sedol from Korea. They both like fighting, and so
do I. I cannot keep up with all the new teenage prodigies from China.

Leamington Part 3

Redmond reviewed three games supplied by members of the audience. The first
was one of my regular club games, and I received two stones. It was
played at 30 minutes each, sudden death. I was further handicapped by having
to record the moves. My opponent in this game knows even fewer joseki than I
do, so he won. Comments are embedded in the game record.


Redmond remarked that Black's comments in this game were a higher standard than
the game itself. There's no mystery: my comments were made after consulting
Ishida's English-language joseki dictionary, a copy of Kogo's dictionary (a
large sgf file) and dailyjoseki.com.

I don't agree with Redmond's advice that weak players should not try to play
complex joseki, but that's something for a separate post.

The second game reviewed by Redmond was played between two double-digit kyu
players, but I do not have a record.

The third game reviewed by Redmond was one that I previously posted in the Game
Analysis forum, at http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7338.
Time was running out, so Redmond did not have a lot to say about that game, but what he
did say was similar to Mitsun's comments in the Game Analysis thread. I'll add
Redmond's distinct comments there later.

Redmond introduced a Go proverb (better, a rule of thumb for kyu players) that
was new to me. It is that a group on the edge or in the corner enclosing about
6 points is often unsettled, and should be given priority when looking for
potential targets for attack or defence. I don't have pictures of the shapes
Redmond showed when introducing this idea, so what follows is a 4-kyu-level
attempt to understand and transmit the idea.

Plainly, the group in question must not be free to expand in all directions,
otherwise the number of points it encloses would be undefined. That is similar
to the unstated assumption in the proverb about a string of stones on the
second line: "8 live, 6 die", namely that both ends of the string are blocked
by strong stones of the opposite colour. Also, the 6 enclosed points are
assumed to be contiguous: if the enclosed points are imagined as forming
distinct regions, then it is obvious that only two points may be needed for
life. Consulting the sections on Notchers in Life and Death by James Davies,
or the detailed material on Notchers in Sensei's Library indicates that shapes
with 6 enclosed points often stand near the border between life and death. And
even I know (though I forget it during play) that the status of a group
enclosing a rectangular block of six liberties in the corner depends on whether
that group has 0, 1 or 2 outside liberties. A final pair of examples from Life
and Death: an enclosed L group is dead but the Tripod group is alive (assuming
external liberties in the right places), and both groups enclose about 6
points. Redmond's new proverb extends this knowledge to loose groups of stones
near the edge or the corner in the early middle-game, before the shapes are
fully defined. As always, there is no substitute for accurate reading.

The long evening finished with a well-deserved round of applause for Redmond
Sensei, to which he responded by standing and bowing in a very Japanese way.

Here are some thoughts on how the event could have been improved.

The event took place in a narrow room at the back of a pub. It was not ideal.
The room did not have a door, so I was distracted from time to time as someone
in the kitchen dropped a metal tray on a tiled floor, or whatever it is that
they do in a pub kitchen to make a sound like a cymbal clash. And sitting at
the back, I had to reconstruct many of the questions (which I could not hear)
from Redmond's answers (which I could hear).

Redmond was initially presented with CGoban3 as the program for displaying game
records, but he was not familiar with it. He eventually found the program he
prefers, but I was too far back to see its name. Does anyone else know what it
was?

The Leamington club should have provided Redmond with better-quality kyu games
for review. Members could have played them in advance with long time limits by
prior arrangement on the Internet, which would also have ensured accurate
and complete records.

Here are some questions I would like to have asked, but was not cheeky enough
to risk. Maybe someone else can ask them at a future date.

Q. You mentioned that you are stronger than your wife. How strong are you
compared to the current top-rank female professionals from Korea and China?

Q. According to Wikipedia, you were borm in 1963, which makes you in your
fiftieth year. How come you look not a day over 35?

Q. A page on the AGA website
(http://www.usgo.org/news/2010/06/michael-redmond-on-studying-improving-your-game-and-how-the-pros-train/)
shows you holding print-outs of positions in games with about 30 moves
still to play, which you studied in the hope of squeezing out more points in
the end-game. Do you still do this? (Even weak amateurs could do this, only
with fewer moves outstanding.)

Q. Would a Japanese audience have asked so many personal questions?

My thanks go to Michael Redmond, and to all those who made the event possible.

It looks like he's using Drago.

Looks more like Multigo